The Witness: An Open-World Puzzle Game on PlayStation 4

We, Thekla, Inc., are a small independent development team located in San Francisco, California, USA. Our current project is a game called The Witness, where you explore a mysterious island and solve puzzles. Thematically, it’s a game about epiphany, that leap your mind makes when you instantly go from confusion to understanding.

The game takes place in an open world, so that you can go wherever you want.

For a puzzle game, this is nice, because it means we can include real puzzles that challenge and surprise you. In a linear game, if you get stuck on a puzzle, you are usually just stuck unless you look up the answer; this is why many linear games shy away from puzzles with non-obvious solutions. In The Witness, we can make puzzles as difficult or as subtle as we want, because if you are stuck in an area, you can simply go somewhere else.

However, we are not just trying to make hard puzzles. Some puzzles in The Witness are hard, but some are easy. However, even the easy puzzles are interesting, because every puzzle has a little bit of communication wrapped inside it. We work hard to make each communication as clear and interesting as we can. So when you work through a bunch of puzzles in the game, you have also experienced a flow of ideas, presented to you at a high density.

Unlike most open worlds, which try to be as big as possible, The Witness takes place on a compact island. You can run across the whole island in 1 minute 10 seconds, yet we have 25 hours of unique puzzle gameplay with no filler and no repetition. We have designed it so that wherever you are, if you want to change paths and go somewhere else, there are three or four different places to go, all within 20 seconds’ walk.

We have been working on this game for 3 1/2 years and we are finally coming toward the end of development. It really is the best game that we know how to make, and we look forward to delivering these experiences to you on the upcoming PlayStation 4 console.

22 Comments

Great showing!
Hopefully you or Sony can discuss how the new Store and PS4 will be better for Indie devs. Is the pricing structure cheaper and more competitive? Is it a streamlined process to submit your games? How does it compare to Steam, iOS and others?

Yay Jonathan! As I’ve been following the Witness blog for what seems like ages now, the highlight of my night was seeing you on stage (what a shocker!), followed by the world’s first look at that trailer!

Open world puzzler so you can come back when you get stuck? Brilliant idea. Oh, the many games I’ve had to give up on because of forced linear progression. Such a beautiful world I won’t be the “put it on Vita or no buy” jerk on this post.

I am very excited for this, probably the highlight of the show for me. I hope that they have a PS4 native version of Braid (perhaps with 24-bit lossless audio?) available near the same time.

Speaking of Myst, realMYST would be a *fantastic* cross-buy release for PS3/PS4/Vita. I’ve been holding off on buying the iPad version because I want dual-stick controls and the big-screen surround-sound experience.

Really excited to see these great, artful games in 1080p native with 4x FXAA and HD audio :)

I thought I would like this game, but I didn’t get much from the trailer. The puzzles, for example, I have no idea what’s going on there… perhaps this is an answer Mr. Blow and co will answer or show us with gameplay in the months to come.

PS, why do you have to be so condescending to other game makers? “It’s gonna be hard to follow all those… ex-plosions”

Every genre has its place. Some games are stupid, some games are huge and “cinematic,” some games are miracles (Journey, Unfinished Swan, maybe Braid? haven’t played it yet).